Israel Zangwill

Zangwill's classic novella "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891)
is the flagship of the modern locked room story. In these tales,
a crime is committed in a room that is locked from the inside.
How could any murderer have committed this crime, and then escaped?
It seems impossible. This sort of puzzle is one of the main categories
of modern mystery fiction. Writers have devoted considerable ingenuity
to developing solutions to the locked room murder. Locked room
puzzles climax with the work of John Dickson Carr.
A full detailed history of locked room fiction can be found in
Robert C. S. Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible
Crimes. This book contains a bibliography, listing over 2,000
impossible crime novels and short stories.

The non Locked Room aspects of The Big Bow Mystery

The mystery set up of Israel Zangwill's "The Big Bow Mystery"
(1891) reminds one in general terms of Fergus Hume,
and his pioneering mystery bestseller, The Mystery of a Hansom
Cab (1886). It also has features in common with such Hume
influenced authors as Bodkin and Orczy.
All of these writers share some basic paradigms about what a detective
story should be like. Although they are contemporary with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
they seem less influenced by him than one would suspect. Zangwill
opens with an elaborate inquest, which is followed by public speculation
on the solution of the crime: features found in Hume and (and
later in Orczy). The public speculation is done through reading
about the crime in the paper, followed by offering solutions to
the crime in letters to the editor. Orczy's use of armchair detectives
in The Old Man in the Corner (1901), who discuss and solve
the case based on what they read in the newspaper, can be seen
as just an elaborate extension of the many solutions offered by
the newspaper reading public in Zangwill's story. There is also
a network of relationships between the characters in the tale,
which can be interpreted in different ways to create solutions
to the mystery. This network is not set forth quite as calmly
and dispassionately as in other writers who use this basic approach,
however, such as Hume, Orczy and Bodkin. Zangwill's tale has plenty
of humor, an attribute as well of Bodkin.

Zangwill has some unique characteristics not derived from Hume,
however. Importantly, Zangwill's book shows a full commitment
to the puzzle plot. Zangwill's 1895 preface to the book is the
first statement known to me of the principle of fair play
in detective fiction, although he does not actually use the term
"fair play".

The Locked Room

Chapter 4 of Zangwill's story contains multiple proposed solutions
to his locked room puzzle. It is a virtual locked room lecture,
44 years before Carr's famous one in The Three Coffins
(1935). The immense variety of solutions suggested makes "The
Big Bow Mystery" not just a single mystery, but virtually
an entire genre of "Locked room fiction", all in itself.
Did Zangwill dream up all of these ideas by himself? Are they
references to earlier authors? Did he incorporate ideas from his
readers' letters? (The novel appeared serially, and Zangwill's
preface describes the mass of proposed solutions he received from
readers.) Zangwill might not have invented the locked room mystery,
but he definitely crystallized it as a genre with this book.

Zangwill's book explicitly invokes Edgar Allan Poe's
"Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) as its ancestor.
There was a whole Victorian tradition of direct variations on
Poe's tale, largely by casebook writers
such as Charles Martel, M.M.B., and the casebook-influenced Arthur Morrison.
All of these writers limited themselves to very small variations
on Poe's original solution. Zangwill is vastly more inventive.
His chapter 4 lists a large number of far more ingenious variations
on Poe. Then his actual solution at the end of the tale develops
a radically different approach from Poe's to the impossible crime,
one not dependent on physical objects, but on deceptive rearrangements
in time and space. This is the major new direction to be followed
by 20th Century locked room fiction, especially G.K. Chesterton
and his successors.

Zangwill's use of multiple proposed solutions also anticipates
such Golden Age books as Bentley'sTrent's
Last Case, Berkeley'sThe Poisoned
Chocolates Case, and Queen'sThe
Greek Coffin Mystery.

The best part of Zangwill's story is the first four chapters,
which outline the mystery plot, together with the final chapter.
Most of the other, later chapters, outline a blind alley in the
investigation, and contain a great deal of off beat characterizations.
This is a bit padded.

H. Greenhough Smith

H. Greenhough Smith's "The Case of Roger Carboyne" (1892) is one of the earliest
"footprints in the snow" impossible crimes. In such tales, a corpse is found alone in the snow,
with no footprints of any possible killer near the body. It looks impossible for the
murder to have happened. A common variant has the victim isolated on a sandy beach
without footprints. "The Case of Roger Carboyne" contains such a puzzle,
mixed in with related kinds of mysteries.

"The Case of Roger Carboyne" is brief, even for a short story.
The tale does not resemble a Sherlock Holmes story,
with a crime developed into a complex dramatic arc of considerable length.
Instead, "The Case of Roger Carboyne" resembles a bit the brief crime tales
that often appeared in American newspapers in the second half of the 1800's.
Like them, it has mystery ideas, and sets them forth in a direct,
straightforward manner.

"The Case of Roger Carboyne" contains no detective. The mystery is set forth,
then almost immediately, the solution is presented.

"The Case of Roger Carboyne" perhaps influenced Meade and Eustace's
"The Secret of Emu Plain" (1898). "The Secret of Emu Plain" is not a footprints mystery.
But its geography is similar, and events in the two tales' mysteries are also
similar. The solution in "The Secret of Emu Plain" can be read as a variation of the one
in "The Case of Roger Carboyne", although it has significant differences as well.

Samuel Hopkins Adams' "The Flying Death" (1903)
is a footprints mystery - but one with a very different approach in
details and solution than "The Case of Roger Carboyne".

Edgar Wallace

Zangwill's "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891) anticipates
in tone Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905). Both books
are full of liberal satire, both feature crimes that are public
cause celèbres, both are locked room stories, and in both
the motive behind the locked room is partly to create The Perfect
Crime. Both are also novella length. Zangwill's finale, where
one of his characters penetrates rather threateningly to the Home
Secretary, reminds one of the central plot in Wallace against
an English minister. The Four Just Men surprises with its
liberal attitude toward politics and social justice. It is far
more openly liberal than about anything in modern mystery fiction.
Current mystery writers suffer from their disinterest in politics,
society, science or just about anything else out of the common
range of interests. Wallace's book seems like a model of openness
in a desert of right wing Tom Clancyness. Wallace also includes
mountains of sparkling social satire in his book.

Wallace was still writing impossible crime stories fourteen years
later in "The Stolen Romney" (1919). There is the same
attempt by sympathetic, idealistic criminals (and Robin Hood types)
to penetrate a government protected sanctum here as in The
Four Just Men, and the same defiant warnings from the criminals
to the cops. The first half of "Code No. 2" (1916) is
another good crime tale in the same mode, with agents sneaking
up on a government code book. Although Bland is a spy with England's'
Secret Service, this story is close to the puzzle plot mystery.

Wallace went on to become an immensely popular writer of thrillers.
I cannot justify these books as mystery classics - their plotting
is often routine and the writing perfunctory - but I always enjoy
the raffishness and brio of Wallace's characters. They lead the
sort of lives of adventure that most people would enjoy. Wallace
was noticeably internationalist in scope, and his characters come
from every ethnic group, and globe trot around the world.

Sergeant Sir Peter

Wallace's Sergeant Sir Peter (1929 - 1930) is a collection
of stories about an aristocratic young man who becomes a Police
Sergeant. Despite this conceit, this collection is much more realistic
about life in Britain than many Golden Age works. The first two
stories deal sympathetically with people who are discriminated
against in British society: Indians, women, and the working poor.
Wallace bluntly shows discrimination against racial minorities,
and the oppression of women. Wallace also delights in exposing
the flaws of the rich. There is also an emphasis on the financial
needs of workers. Such material is fairly unusual in his era,
and is consistent with the liberal sensibility Wallace exhibits
in his other works. Unlike many writers with a point of view,
Wallace shows little self righteousness. Instead, there is a tone
of sly, risqué comedy, as Wallace gives us a inside look
at the vices and follies of British life. The tone is one of an
exposé, a droll recounting of the faults of everyone in
the tale. The liberal look at social oppression is simply woven
within this, as one more strand within his realistic account of
British life.

Some of the sociological background here seems similar to early
Dorothy L. Sayers, although Wallace is
much more liberal. The look at people of color in Britain recalls
Unnatural Death (1927), while the feminist aspects of women
coping with difficult husbands reminds one of The Unpleasantness
at the Bellona Club. Wallace's sleuth Sir Peter shares both
Lord Peter Wimsey's first name, and his aristocratic background.

Sergeant Sir Peter bears some resemblance to Agatha Christie'sPartners in Crime (1924-1928). Christie's sleuths were
young socialites playing at being private detectives, Wallace's
a young aristocrat taking on the job of a policemen. Both series
are full of humor and social satire. The puzzle plot of Wallace's
first story, "The Four Missing Merchants", resembles
to a degree Christie's "The Case of the Missing Lady".
In general, there is a Christie like feel to Wallace's puzzle
plots here. Wallace, like Christie, is clearly in the tradition
of Intuitionist detective writers. Wallace's "The Desk Breaker"
deals with events whose motivation and hidden, underlying pattern
are difficult to determine. It involves looking at the events
in a different light, to understand their cause. This is the same
sort of plot approach one will find in such inutuitionist tales
as Christie's "The Affair at the Bungalow" (1930) and
Ellery Queen's "The Seven Black
Cats" (1933). Wallace's plot is composed of not just one,
but two such events: the crime and the "domestic objects".

Several Wallace tales similarly deal with relationships that can
be interpreted in more than one way. Such relationships are prominent
in Fergus Hume, and writers who descended
from him, such as Wallace and Christie. Wallace sometimes uses
these relationships to build puzzle plots, as do other mystery
writers. But he also sometimes sets them forth without any mystery,
right in the exposition of the story. For example, the relationship
between the policeman and the crooks at the start of "Death
Watch" can be viewed two different ways, something that victimizes
the innocent policeman in the tale. Wallace uses this not to build
a mystery, but to get his plot rolling. Such relationships show
Wallace's ingenuity. They adapt a technique, that of the ambiguous
relationship, originally developed for puzzle plots, to do storytelling
instead. Wallace is full of unusual relationships between crooks
and other groups, such as police, middle class people, both honest
and dishonest, and other professional crooks. In addition to ambiguity,
these relationships tend to cause surprising consequences and
results.

The Three Just Men tale, "The Man Who Sang in Church"
(1927), also employs ambiguity in an unusual way. Here, the detective
and the reader get only the sketchiest idea at the start of the
story, about the backgrounds and activities of a criminal and
his victim. The mystery in the tale involves the detective's attempt
to figure out this background, and give a consistent, logical
explanation of the few strange and apparently illogical clues
he has about this background. This is an unusual structure for
a mystery tale. While a typical mystery story involves a mysterious
crime, here the mystery is in the lives and background of the
people involved in the crime - the blackmail crime itself is not
especially mysterious. This story can be considered an "experimental"
work. Like Erle Stanley Gardner, Wallace
is a writer with a prolific outflowing of plot, a gift that sometimes
help him construct stories that experimental in form.

The details on police incompetence at the start of "Death
Watch" are also interesting; they give the lie to the statement
that British Golden Age fiction always depicted the police in
a favorable light. The article on H.C. Bailey
discusses this in more detail.

"Death Watch" is a novella, more a thriller than a mystery.
It is one of what seems to be a whole genre of British thrillers,
mainly novels, in which a country villa is under siege by night
by "supernatural hauntings". Such works include Georgette Heyer's
first crime novel, Footsteps in the Dark (1932), and
Elsie N. Wright's Strange Murders at Greystones (1931).
William Hope Hodgson's
"The Searcher of the End House" (1910) from Carnacki
the Ghost Finder is an early version of this kind of tale, although
it has quite a few differences from the later stories. One wonders
if there were silent movie melodramas with similar plots. These
books are only on the fringe of the mystery proper, being closer
to the thriller. They have elements of mystery: they are usually
seen from the point of view of the innocent inhabitants of the
villa, who have no idea what is going on, and who treat the happenings
as unexplained mysteries. However, there are no ingenious solutions,
just the exposure of the bad guys. The bad guys are a gang, so
there is not a revelation of a single hidden criminal, either,
the way there is in a murder mystery. There always seems to be
a hidden tunnel into the cellar. The residents of the villa tend
to be middle class, and very proper, with touches of satiric humor,
whereas the crooks tend to be small potatoes British crooks, bad
guys, but not terrifyingly lethal. The servants of the villa always
seem to know more than they are letting on, and have hidden ties
to the criminals. There is definitely a touch of comic class warfare
to these tales, with the middle class inhabitants versus the working
class servants and crooks.

The Impossible Crime Movement

Calling the entire period 1891 - 1914 the Sherlock Holmes era
is misleading. It actually splits into at least two periods. Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes became famous in 1891, and there came a flood
of writers in 1891 - 1896 that were clearly influenced by Doyle.
These included Arthur Morrison, C.L. Pirkis, Harry Blyth, Headon
Hill, and M.P. Shiel. All of these wrote Doyle-like short stories
about consulting detectives. This phase did not last long, but
it did give rise to a fundamental change in the detective fiction
market, the emphasis on the short story.

After the initial Doyle era (1891 - 1896), there came a large
number of writers who often focused on impossible crimes during
the period 1897 - 1914. Bodkin, Meade and Eustace,
Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men, Gaston Leroux, the Hanshews,
Futrelle, Ernest Bramah, William Hope Hodgson,
Carolyn Wells, some of Whitechurch'sThrilling Stories of the Railway, parts of R. Austin Freeman'sJohn Thorndyke's Cases, even The Red Thumb Mark,
and G.K. Chesterton, for starters. (Meade and Eustace's fiction
well could be discussed here, but it was even more pioneering
in the history of scientific detection, and is included in that
article.) Even a veteran like Fergus Hume
got into the act with "The Ghost's Touch", and Robert Barr
wrote "The Sad Case of Sophia Brooks". It is hard to
know what prompted such an approach. Most of these stories are
not explicitly labeled as "impossible crimes", although
they are. One possibility is that a mystery just looks that much
more mysterious if it is impossible. Certainly, these tales played
a role in the rise of the puzzle story. Earlier mysteries sometimes
found it hard to draw a clear line between the mystery and the
adventure tale. But once you got an impossibility in a tale, there
is now a puzzle that must be explained. Adventurous sleuthing
around, and chasing down bad guys is just not going to cut it.
Sooner or later, the detective is going to have to explain how
the seeming impossibility was committed. This means that the detective
is now firmly in the role of explainer of puzzles. In other words,
including impossibility in their tales helped these writers solidify
a genre, that of puzzle plot fiction.

The role of the impossible crime story in the history of detective
fiction seems similar to the role of infinity in the history of
mathematics. In mathematics, infinity seems at first glance to
be just another topic of study, one branch of mathematics among
many others. But a closer look reveals the study of infinity to
be the well spring of many advances in mathematics. Mathematics
as a whole does not contain infinity as a subtopic; rather infinity
is a source or root, out of which the rest of mathematics springs.
(I learned about this from Carl B. Boyer's classic A History
of Mathematics (1968).)

Similarly, it looks to a degree, as if the fair play, puzzle plot
school of mystery stems from the impossible crime movement, rather
than the latter just being a subgenre of the former. First, around
1897 impossible crimes became the rage, and helped lay the foundation
for the modern puzzle plot mystery. Then around 1910, the impossible
crime specialist G. K. Chesterton's work became the leading role
model for the Golden Age mystery writers of the 1920's and 1930's.
In pulp magazines, the "weird menace tales",
pulpdom's version of impossible crime fiction, which were born
around 1930, became the origin of many "hero pulp" writers,
and laid a foundation for Cornell Woolrich
and the modern suspense tale, as well. Finally, so many American
Golden Age writers specialized in impossible crimes, especially
the great John Dickson Carr, but also C. Daly King,
Clyde B. Clason, Hake Talbot,
Clayton Rawson, and later Joseph Commings,
that impossible crime fiction seems not like a subgenre of Golden
Age detective fiction, but one of two equal branches of detective
fiction of its era.

What the infinite is in mathematics, the impossible is in the
mystery story. There are formal similarities in the two concepts,
as well. Both the impossible and the infinite are two of the deepest
mysteries of their subjects, difficult concepts that puzzle and
stimulate the intellects of all who study them. Studying them
is like looking into a very deep well, or into the eye of a dragon
in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Farthest Shore.

M. McDonnell Bodkin

M. McDonnell Bodkin's works show several similarities with those
of the later writer Ernest Bramah:

There is an emphasis on impossible
crimes. These crimes tend to be committed with mechanical devices,
ingenious bad machines that operate on their own, after
they are set up, and which kill people or otherwise commit some crime.

There is an emphasis on rogues in their fictions.
The identity of the bad guy is often fairly obvious
in their tales. A great deal of emphasis is laid on constructing
a colorful personality for this villain, a character portrait
mixing comic elements and appealingly gaudy traits with sinister
aspects, usually motivated by a rogue's desire for more money.
These rogues are often designed to have reader sympathy, to a
degree, like such later popular villains as J.R. Ewing
(of the TV series Dallas).

There is an emphasis on a sophisticated comic tone. The
descriptive writing is debonair. There are bon mots, and attempts
at clever little philosophical comments and social observations.

The rogue in Bodkin's story "The Vanishing Diamonds"
(1897) has some distinctive personality traits. Bodkin's detective
Paul Beck is his friend, and Beck is in the habit of going to
him for advice on solving his cases. Beck thinks this man would
have made a great detective, and finds it a pity that he choose
the profession of a magician instead. The advice is often given
over meals the two men share, meals that take place in the rather
ordinary, middle class restaurants the magician-rogue favors.
The rogue follows cases through newspaper clippings, as well as
from information delivered to him by Beck. To illustrate one of
his points about unraveling a crime, the magician makes knots
in a piece of string, and unties them. Does this sound like anyone
we know? It sure reminds one of The Old Man in the Corner, Baroness Orczy's
armchair sleuth, who debuted four years later in 1901.

Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective

Dora Myrl, Bodkin's "Lady Detective", shows some similarity
with Grant Allen's Lois Cayley, whose
adventures appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1898. This
was apparently before Dora Myrl, whose stories were collected
in book form in 1900, although I don't know their original magazine
publication date. The scenes in "How He Cut his Stick"
in which Dora Myrl trails the male villain by bicycle, remind
one of the bicycle race in which Miss Cayley tries to catch up
with a male cyclist. Both Lois Cayley and Dora Myrl seem to be
"new women". Both are in business, and both make much
money off of their efforts. Both deal with male businessmen on
a position of equality, both constantly impress men with their
intelligence and ability, both wind up being highly respected
by the men around them. Both also have to rescue young male heroes
in the stories, who while very likable, wind up seeming a lot
less competent that the heroine. This whole approach marks these
women as the precursors to the highly able heroines of contemporary books.

The Quests of Paul Beck

"The devilish ingenuity of Mr Bodkin's criminals is such as to make
the nervous tremble for a world without Paul Beck." - Yorkshire Daily Observer

Impossible Crimes. "Trifles Light as Air" is not an impossible crime tale.
But its murder method has links to Bodkin's impossible crime works.
Also, the hidden murder method makes it look impossible for the real killer to have done it.

"Drowned Diamonds" is a borderline impossible crime story. Its puzzle
anticipates such works as S.S. Van Dine'sThe Dragon Murder Case (1933), John Dickson Carr'sA Graveyard to Let (1949), and Edward D. Hoch's
"The Problem of the Poisoned Pool" (1993), although it is simpler than those,
and not quite as "impossible" looking as a mystery situation.
Its solution is different from Van Dine's, Carr's and Hoch's.
"Drowned Diamonds" also pleases, by having extra mystery subplots, linked to its main puzzle.

"The Rape of the Ruby" is a mystery, but its main merits are its
good story telling - its robbery plot is simple and easily figured out.
Once again, Bodkin makes it look impossible for the actual robber to have committed the crime,
giving the tale a bit of a connection to the impossible crime tradition.
The simple diagram and what it leads to, are also a pleasing plot element.
Having its heroine be an actress not only adds a bit of show business
to the story. It also offers a welcome change from all the idle young
heiresses that are the main heroines of the Beck tales. Both the actress and her maid
are working women.

"The Unseen Hand" is an impossible crime. R. Austin Freeman's
"The Blue Sequin" (1908) has a solution that seems like a variation on the one in "The Unseen Hand".
The nephew is an early example of a sarcastic, cynical Upper Class Twit: a character type
that sometimes appears in the Golden Age to come. He makes outrageously cynical remarks.

Background. "The Spanish Prisoner" is an entertaining piece of story telling.
It has no mystery, but rather is a suspense or thriller tale.
Much of it takes place in an exotic foreign setting.
Other mystery writers sometimes included a change-of-pace foreign adventure
in their collections: Max Pemberton'sJewel Mysteries I Have Known (1895) has "The Watch and the Scimitar",
set in the Casbah in Algiers. Unlike many writers of the era who seem
prejudiced against foreigners or Latins, Bodkin treats his Spanish characters
with sympathy.

"The Ship's Run", one of the stories in Bodkin's The Quests of Paul Beck
(collected in book form in 1908), takes place on a huge ocean
liner called Titanic. This is four years before the actual
ocean liner Titanic sailed - and sank. At first glance
this looks prescient, even clairvoyant. Actually, plans for a
Titanic like ship had been highly publicized for years.
And these plans referred to the ship under its original name,
Gigantic. Long before Bodkin, the American author Morgan
Robertson published a whole novel called Futility (1898),
about a huge, "unsinkable" ocean liner called Titan,
that promptly hits an iceberg and goes down. It was an attack
on the shipowners' disregard for public safety that affected the
building of the actual Titanic. Readers can get much more
information about this from Martin Gardner's book, The Wreck
of the Titanic Foretold? (1986). Bodkin was far more optimistic
about the whole Titanic enterprise, incorrectly as it turns
out. His ship sails smoothly on over all obstacles. Bodkin's fiction
shows a fascination with trains, bicycles, ships and other modern,
high tech forms of transportation. Bodkin was not alone in this.
His fellow impossible crime writer, Jacques Futrelle, actually
sailed on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. After seeing
his wife May Futrelle to safety in a life boat, he went down with
the ship, taking the manuscripts of several unpublished Thinking
Machine stories with him.

"'Twixt the Devil and the Deep Sea" is another shipboard tale, with an easily guessed mystery plot.
The subplot about Archer is not bad, though, and the story has some plot surpasses.
The tale is notable for its liberal politics, dealing with labor relations.

"The Voice from the Dead" has a millionaire's study fixed up with every modern, electric machine.
Notable also, is the "electric motor" car that brings the detective to the mansion from the station.

Both men like to spring handcuffs on the crook they have captured,
at the ends of the tales. (One wonders if, as private detectives with no
official standing, they are legally entitled to do this!)

Both detectives are masters of disguise. Like Sherlock Holmes and other
detectives of their era, they frequently adopt new guises and roles.
But both men go further: they actually have the ability to impersonate other men,
turning themselves into exact doubles. This skill is used only rarely:
Beck in "Driven Home", Cleek in "The Problem of the Red Crawl".
Both of these are pure thriller tales, without mystery or puzzle elements.

Both men occasionally solve impossible crimes.

At the end of the otherwise routine "His Hand and Seal", sleuth Beck has the Attorney General gather all
the witnesses who had appeared at the inquest together, before Beck reveals the solution.
This is not quite a "gathering of the suspects" found in later detective fiction,
but it is similar.

Into the Matrix: The Work of Jacques Futrelle

The Thinking Machine

Jacques Futrelle's tales of the Thinking Machine are some of the
best detective stories even written. The Thinking Machine, a professor
who received his nickname from the press for his intellectual
acuity, appeared in a series of around 50 stories, from 1905 to
Futrelle's death on the Titanic in 1912. Even the less
successful Thinking Machine tales have features which make them
enjoyable and worth reading.

What seems to be the complete Thinking Machine stories can be found on-line at:
http://www.futrelle.com/.
This contains all the Thinking Machine stories in the recommended
reading list at the start of this article, by the way.
Publication data for many of the tales can be found
here
and here.

Futrelle's tales seem extraordinarily surrealistic. Events in
them are often bizarre, and with strange emotional undertones
that come right out of the unconscious. Futrelle is at the start
of an American tradition of "pop" Surrealism, that encompasses
the detective fiction of Ellery Queen
and Craig Rice, and the films of Buster
Keaton and such Warner Brothers Loony Tunes animators as Tex Avery
and Chuck Jones. All of these artists produced work as part of
popular culture that encompass a full, delirious surrealism. If
this work is strange, it is rarely downbeat. There is a harmonious
beauty of form to the plots of most of these artists, that seems
like the unfolding of the musical argument of a Mozart or Beethoven.
It represents the storytelling instinct at its most graceful.
Much of their work seems like an expression of joy. Futrelle's
stories often pile mystery upon mystery in baffling fashion. The
enigmatical detective investigations of the Thinking Machine,
whose underlying motivations are not always shared with the reader,
often aid the sense of endless mysteries, as well. The Thinking
Machine's investigative ideas are often remarkably trenchant.

Futrelle's stories often deal with impossible crimes. He did not
invent the impossible crime - he came after such impossible crime
specialists as Zangwill and the team of Meade and Eustace,
and was a contemporary of Hanshew - but his work in this field
has a special exuberance, a rich power of invention. One of his
stories, "The Silver Box" deals with the apparently
impossible leakage of business information. This same subject
was the theme of some of Meade and Eustace's series of Florence
Cusack tales. These tales only appeared in magazines and were
never collected in book form, so it is unclear if Futrelle ever
saw them. In any case, Futrelle's method for the leaking of the
information was original, and not found anywhere in his predecessors.

Futrelle's methodology as a writer of impossible crime stories
centers on lines of communication. Pipes, strings, telephone
lines, chains of mirrors used to reflect light - all of these
appear in his stories. All of these devices are used to convey
information from one point to another, in a way that seems at
first glance to be impossible. A similar approach is found in
the works of Meade and Eustace, and to a degree in Hanshew. Similarly,
the emphasis on signaling devices in Whitechurch's train stories
reflects an essentially similar interest in the high tech matrix
of modern communication, a poetic, imaginative response to the
growing communication grid of the modern world. This is in contrast
to the bad machines found first in the impossible crime
stories of M. McDonnell Bodkin, and then in Ernest Bramah.

Futrelle has affinities with the "scientific"
school of American detective writers, who were his contemporaries.
His detective hero was a scientist, and his plots can turn on
technology and ingenious devices. However, this element is but
one of many that goes to make up his fiction, and the scientific
aspect is much less central here than in the works of Reeve or
MacHarg and Balmer. There is also less of an atmosphere of "realism"
to Futrelle's tales, compared to most of the works of the "scientific"
school. They are more fairy tale like, and escapist. His tone
is closer to such successors as Chesterton and Christie.

Futrelle wrote a couple of stories with an art world background,
including the simple "Problem of the Stolen Rubens"
and the more substantial "Mystery of a Studio". His
depiction of painters and their work shows a certain knowledgeability.
Boston during his era was a center of American painting. All of
this was before the Armory Show (1913) introduced modern art to the American
public.

Non-Impossible Crimes

Not all of Futrelle's tales deal with impossible crimes. "The
Man Who Was Lost" is the earliest mystery story known to
me dealing with amnesia. Futrelle rings many ingenious changes
on this theme. He also delved in the mind of a man with delusions
in "The Mystery of Room 666" (1910). This story, with
its hero-narrator in prison charged with a crime, and with his
strange dreams and fancies, seems anticipatory in its apocalyptic
tone of T.S. Stribling's "A Passage
to Benares" (1926). "The Mystery of Room 666" is
the only non-Thinking Machine short story by Futrelle easily available
today. E. F. Bleiler says that Futrelle also wrote sports stories
and Westerns, but these have not been reprinted.

"Five Millions by Wireless" is an early kidnapping tale.
Its solution will become a standard in works by later writers,
such as Dashiell Hammett's "The
Gatewood Caper" (1923). Like Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales
where governments employ Holmes' help on a diplomatic crisis,
this story expresses the middle class' strong skepticism about
the aristocracy. This tale gets the Thinking Machine personally
involved in adventure, as do "The Problem of the Cross Mark"
and "The Problem of the Deserted House" (1907).

One year after the Thinking Machine's debut in "The Problem
of Cell 13" (1905), Futrelle produced the only novella about
his sleuth, "The Chase of the Golden Plate" (1906).
This is the only non-short story to feature the Thinking Machine.
The novella seems badly padded and slow moving, and is only occasionally
interesting. It does build up a carefully constructed plot. This
plot has affinities with two short stories Futrelle would write.
Like "The Three Overcoats", "The Chase of the Golden
Plate" deals with confusions of identity, long buried histories
of conflict and questions of honor, and romantic issues. Like
"The Problem of the Auto Cab", "The Chase of the
Golden Plate" concerns a mysterious robbery during a society
party, the return of the valuable loot, and gets Hutchinson Hatch
unusually involved in leg work during the early stages of the
case before the Thinking Machine is brought into the problem.
Both of these brief tales are much better than the novella, with
"The Problem of the Auto Cab" being especially delightful.

Some of Futrelle's non-impossible crime tales show the influence
of Rogue fiction. Clever, dominating,
well-dressed rogues appear in "The Three Overcoats",
"The Jackdaw Girl" and "The Problem of the Cross
Mark". The young businessman in "The Problem of the
Vanishing Man" also falls into this tradition.

Futrelle's novels, which are mainly romantic melodramas, not mysteries,
hold up much less well today. They seem thin, padded, and relatively
plotless, especially compared to the short stories.

The Diamond Master

His novella "The Diamond Master" (1909) is also a disappointment.
The best parts are the first four chapters, which describe the
diamonds themselves, with Futrelle's surrealistic flair.

Despite some elements of mystery, this is basically a thriller, not a
mystery story in any sense. Certain conventions of the thriller
are satirized or burlesqued: following suspects (Chapter V), and
the third degree (the end of the story).

The hero of the story
is not the much satirized private detective Mr. Birnes, but the
young businessman. Futrelle idolized businessmen, and equated
success in business, especially the robber baron, Captain of Industry
mode, with male virility. This is odd contrast to his similar
idolization of pure intellect, in the form of the decidedly different
Thinking Machine. Together with the many dynamic, clearly sexually
energetic women found in his work, it gives his stories a strong
charge of sexual symbolism. This interest in sexuality is typical
of the surrealist mode. One often feels in Futrelle's work that
every sort of sexual idea is bubbling up and ready to explode
from the subconscious.

The Hanshews

The Man of the Forty Faces

Sleuth Hamilton Cleek made his debut in the short story collection,
The Man of the Forty Faces (collected 1910). The Hamilton
Cleek mysteries by the Hanshews, which often feature impossible
crimes, were favorite childhood reading of John Dickson Carr.
Ellery Queen's somewhat satiric comments
on the tales focused on the campier aspects of the Cleek saga,
with the detective Hamilton Cleek being a Balkan Prince caught
up in Ruritanian romance. I have just read one for the first time,
"The Riddle of the 5:28", and find it far more of a
straightforward mystery tale than I had imagined. It is not at
all campy in tone, the Prince works closely and normally with
Scotland Yard, and a fair play impossible crime story is spun
out, entertainingly if somewhat implausibly in solution. There
are signs of trying to appeal to a (male) juvenile audience in
the stories: the Prince employs a Cockney lad (19 years old) as
an assistant, he being a character with whom boys might identify;
the prose tries to create a thrilling tone, complete with dramatic
climaxes; and there is a great deal of attention paid to trains,
automobiles and other machinery, something that boys of all ages
love. By contrast there is a great deal of grown up romance, including
a villainous character who engages in adulterous affairs.

The tone of the story over all matches that of Arthur B. Reeve's
Craig Kennedy stories to come, with its stalwart, highly intelligent
hero; a cast of characters involved in the corrupter aspects of
the era's high life and all under suspicion, with the characters
all assembled at the end for the revelation of the guilty party
by the detective; the emphasis on dramatic writing; the focus
on technology and machinery; and a setting more of public life
than of pure domesticity. The Man of the Forty Faces appeared
in book form in 1910, the year before Reeve started writing his
Craig Kennedy tales in 1911.

Some of the other tales in The Man of the Forty Faces also
involve scientific mysteries. "The Riddle of the Ninth Finger",
"The Lion's Smile", and "The Divided House"
are all about mysterious illnesses or afflictions, that seem to
have no known cause. Cleek eventually provides medical, science-based
explanations for the afflictions. "The Divided House"
is the best of these, the one where the solution is cleverest,
and also most plausible. "The Riddle of the Ninth Finger"
is the poorest, with the circus melodrama "The Lion's Smile"
somewhere in the middle. These stories perhaps influenced Agatha Christie,
for example, in "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb"
and "The Tragedy at Marsden Manor", in Poirot Investigates.

"The Riddle of the Rainbow Pearl" in has a full-fledged
background of Ruritanian romance. It is well done and entertaining
escapist storytelling. It combines this with a mystery plot about
a search for a hidden object, in the tradition of Poe's
"The Purloined Letter" (1845). Some of the intrigue
also reminds one of Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891).
The mystery solution is more science oriented than either Poe
or Doyle, however, in keeping with the scientific detection aspect
of Hanshew.

Other of the tales also look for hidden objects: "The Riddle
of the Sacred Son", "The Riddle of the Siva Stones".
"The Riddle of the Sacred Son" has some good storytelling,
as well as a clever solution. Just as "The Riddle of the
Rainbow Pearl" has a delirious melodrama in a Balkan kingdom,
so does "The Riddle of the Sacred Son" invoke an Oriental
extravaganza. Unfortunately, the tale's complete lack of realism
about Asian countries, and its nonsensical depiction of Asian
religion, are in a mode that has become dated, and are now likely
to offend. Hanshew went to great efforts to depict the Asian priest
in the tale as a man of dignity, intelligence and high moral character.
He was clearly trying to write a story that would be non-racist,
and which would form a contrast to the racist tales of Oriental
villains that were then so popular. This is all to his credit.
However, non-realism about Balkan kingdoms, as in "The Riddle
of the Rainbow Pearl", is now just considered campy fun.
Non-realism about Asia, a place with an ugly history of being
exploited by European Colonialism, is still a matter of concern.

Two tales involve disappearances. Such a vanishing inevitably
brings up that favorite question of R. Austin Freeman:
the disposal of the body. Both "The Caliph's Daughter"
and "The Wizard's Belt" have some original ideas on
the subject, in their solutions. Unfortunately, neither is really
gripping as a work of storytelling. Considering their early date,
one wonders if Freeman influenced Hanshew, or Hanshew influenced
Freeman, or whether their common interest in the disposal of the
body was merely part of the zeitgeist. Elements of "The Caliph's
Daughter" anticipate such Freeman novels as The Eye of
Osiris (1911) and The Jacob Street Mystery (1941).

"The Problem of the Red Crawl" is a thriller, without
real elements of mystery. It exploits Cleek's ability to impersonate
seemingly any other person. Cleek anticipates later heroes with
similar gifts, such as Ellery Queen's
detective Drury Lane (1932-1933), and 1940's comic book characters
such as The King and
the Chameleon. The real mystery stories in
The Man of the Forty Faces do not use this ability. Instead,
when Cleek disguises himself in these tales, it is as an imaginary
person, a new made-up persona. "The Problem of the Red Crawl"
is a fairly entertaining melodrama. The red crawl of the title
is vivid.

Cleek's Government Cases

"Murder in an Empty House", from Cleek's Government
Cases (1916), is far fuller of Graustarkian fantasies of honor
and chivalry. It is at once nostalgically appealing, and absurd.
A young Count in the story is described as "the handsomest,
bravest chap ever to don the Emperor's uniform". The aristocratic
Cleek's use of slang to address his friend Superintendent Narkom
of Scotland Yard - "you old fidget" - anticipates similar
slang slinging aristocrats as Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey.
Cleek disguises himself in the uniform of a British Lieutenant
as well. Cleek's constant use of disguises and different identities
reminds one of the Rogue school. The solution
of the impossible crime disappoints, being based on 1916 high
tech gizmos. The affinity to Reeve does persist here, however,
in the high technology nature of the crime. The Hanshews' use
of Hampstead Heath, the setting of Meade and Eustace's
"The Man Who Disappeared" (1901) and Freeman'sA Silent Witness (1914), makes one wonder if the Heath
were somehow the locale of every high tech crime in British history.
Cleek finds a body on the Heath, just as in Freeman's novel.

The World's Finger

Before creating Cleek, Thomas Hanshew wrote numerous mystery novels.
The World's Finger (1901) is something of a hack job. Douglas
G. Greene, who has written the best article on Hanshew's work
(in the Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction,
edited by Frank N. Magill), points out that the rivalry between
detectives in this book derives from Fergus W. Hume. In fact,
much of the book is recognizably in the style of Fergus Hume
and his The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), not so much
in its detectival technique as in its subject matter: its nocturnal
killing on an urban street, its cast of young lovers doubling
as suspects, good looking personable young society men hiding
discreditable secrets, parent child relationships, hidden liaisons
between rich older men and women of the lower classes, shrewd
working class police officers and private detectives, boarding
houses and upper middle class homes, romantic triangles, and illegitimate
births.

Into this Humian stew Hanshew introduces a few original elements.
The book's stalwart heroine does some good detection, in her attempt
to clear her fiancé's name (in Chapters 1-2 of Part Second).
Another amateur detective, a doctor, does a creditable job directing
a murder investigation in the opening chapters, before Scotland
Yard has a chance to show up. These opening chapters (Chapters
1-3 of Part First) contain a mildly interesting impossible crime,
and its solution. The OK solution contains both elements that
are ingenious, and something of a let down. Perhaps someday someone
will reprint this opening section.

The World's Finger is a good title. It would make a good
trilogy with Cornell Woolrich'sNight
Has a Thousand Eyes and Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand
of Darkness.

Carolyn Wells

Faulkner's Folly

Carolyn Wells' Faulkner's Folly (1917) is the first novel
I have read by that author. It shows the frustrating mix of (artistic)
virtue and vice that other commentators have discerned in her
work. The book is startlingly close to the traditions of the Golden
Age novel. But it was written before Christie, Carr, Queen, Van
Dine and other intuitionist Golden Age writers had published a
line. And this is hardly Wells' first work; she had been publishing
for over a decade, since 1906, when this novel appeared. The novel
has an apparent medium who holds séances, etc., and whose "supernatural"
gifts are ultimately explained naturally; this seems very anticipatory
of both John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot.
Carr was in fact devoted to Wells' works while growing up, and
we know from both Ellery Queen and Carr biographer Douglas G.
Greene that he was one of Wells' biggest admirers. Many of Wells'
tales are impossible crime stories; she was apparently one of
the first to expand this genre from the short story to the novel,
following Gaston Leroux.

Faulkner's Folly also anticipates the Golden Age in other
ways. It takes place in an upper class country house, and draws
on a closed circle of suspects of relatives, guests and employees
of the murdered man. There is an atmosphere of culture to the
novel, too; the murdered man was a great painter, and one of his
guests is the widow of the architect who built his mansion. The
whole novel is very close in tone to S.S. Van Dine;
in fact it is one of the closest approximations in feel to his
work among the mystery authors who preceded him.

Wells would certainly be classified as an intuitionist. She started
by publishing in All Story magazine, one of the early pulp magazines
that also featured the work of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
But her work could not be more different from Rinehart's. There
is no sign of an influence from Anna Katherine Green,
or of scientific detection à la Arthur B. Reeve.
Nor is there much suspense of any sort in Wells' work. Instead,
Wells' book is squarely in the intuitionist tradition, and seems
on the direct line to such later intuitionist writers of the Golden
Age listed above.

The best part of Wells' book is the finale, when the murderer
is revealed and the various mysteries are explained. It reminded
me of the pleasure I have received from the finales of Christie,
Carr and other Golden Agers, when all is revealed.

Now for the down sides of Wells' work. Her book is nowhere as
good as a work of storytelling as the later authors we have mentioned.
And her plot is nowhere as clever as these later authors, either.
Bill Pronzini'sGun in Cheek
(1982), his affectionate but hilarious history of really bad crime
fiction, points out other truly major flaws in Wells' works. Her
impossible crime plots tend to depend on secret passageways. This
gimmick was later, during the Golden Age, regarded as a cheat;
the locked room novels of Carr and others often contain solemn
assurances from the author that no secret passageways were found
in the buildings where the crimes occurred. To be fair, Wells
showed some real ingenuity in the use of such secret panels and
doors; but this gimmick is likely to annoy modern readers.

We can compare Wells' novel with "Nick Carter, Detective"
(1891), an early series detective tale. The story opens with a
"locked house" crime. Nick Carter suspects secret passageways,
and sure enough he eventually finds the house to be riddled with
them. They are similar to the secret passageways Herman Landon
used for his Gray Wolf stories in Detective Story in 1920.
Detective Story was the first specialized mystery pulp
magazine. So the impossible crime caused by secret passageways
was a common coin of inexpensive mystery fiction. Carolyn Wells
also used secret passages for her locked room tales in the 1910's,
although she tended to employ Occam's razor on them. She would
employ the minimum number of passages need to commit the crime,
often just one. It would be strategically placed in the only spot
that would allow the crime to be committed. There was a quality
of ingenuity to her placement: it was not at all obvious that
a secret passage anywhere would enable the crime to be possible;
the revelation that a secret passage would make the crime possible
would startle the reader at the end of the story. She achieves
a genuine puzzle plot effect by this approach: where is the secret
passageway, and how could any secret passage possibly enable this
crime?

Anybody But Anne

Anybody But Anne (1913-1914) shares most of the characteristics
of Wells' later Faulkner's Folly:

It is a full, formal mystery novel, of the kind that would later be popular in the Golden Age.

It is set in a country house, and anticipates the mysteries
soon to be popular in such houses.

The cast of suspects resemble those to be found in many later detective books.

It is a locked room mystery - but the solution of the locked room
is based on ideas that would later be regarded as cheating. Still,
the cheat of a solution shows some real ingenuity.

The book shows the imagination with architecture, that would later be
part of the Golden Age. It comes complete with a floor plan. The country house
is of the kind that might have later inspired the mystery game known as Clue or Cluedo:
there is even a billiard room!

Wells pleasantly includes some subsidiary mysteries, that have
nothing to do with the locked room. These too show some mild but pleasing ingenuity.
Such subplots are also standard in Golden Age detective novels.

I do not know if Wells invented the above template for formal mystery novels, or
whether she derived it from other authors. Anybody But Anne does establish,
that what we think of as a "typical Golden Age style mystery novel", was in existence
before what is often thought of as the official start of the Golden Age in 1920.
It is also a fact, that Wells was American, and that her book is set in the United States:
somewhere in New England.

The best parts of Anybody But Anne have charm. People looking to
sample Wells, might enjoy this novel, or at least its best chapters.
It is at its best in the opening (Chapters 1-6), which sets up the architecture,
characters and murder mystery; two later chapters that tell us more about the house
as well as exploring some subsidiary mysteries (14, 17), and lastly the solution
(Chapters 18, 20). Together these sections make a readable novella. The novel has been
scanned by Google Books, and can be read free on-line.

We get a good portrait of Wells' sleuth, Fleming Stone, in action in these sections.
Oddly, he is missing in most of the middle of the book, sections which generally are not that
interesting anyway. Like most pre-1945 detectives, he is more characterized by his
skills and behavior as a detective, than by any knowledge we get of his personal life.
Stone has a penetrating intellect, that goes right to the heart of clues to the mystery,
in the evidence at hand. He is crisp and business-like at delivering his insights,
sharing his ideas immediately with the other characters and the reader.

We do learn that Fleming Stone is outside of the world of romance, like many other early
detectives. Wells gives an interesting psychological portrait of this.

The White Alley

The White Alley (1910, 1915) is not one of Wells' best works. Its chief interest is its
setting, a huge suburban mansion in the Washington Heights district of far-Northern Manhattan.
S.S. Van Dine would depict a somewhat similar mansion with extensive wooded grounds in
The Dragon Murder Case (1933), set a bit further north in the Inwood Hill district.

The mansion, and detective work taking place there, are in Chapters 1, 7, 13, 14, 22 of
The White Alley. These sections show some architectural imagination.

However, the mystery plot lacks "fair play": there are no clues that will let readers deduce the solution.

The solution (Chapter 22) includes an alibi idea, that will later be made famous by
Freeman Wills Crofts in The Cask (1920).

The tone of The White Alley is much darker than Wells' Anybody But Anne.
The characters are nasty, if rich; the story events have nightmarish aspects; the
ancient, colonial mansion has a decrepit air than makes it less fun than the chic modern
country house in Anybody But Anne. All of these things make The White Alley
not much of a reading experience.

Detection

The solutions in the major Wells novels I have read are fairly clued. In Anybody But Anne,
there are two major indications of how people got in and out of the locked room. And there is a
clue as to the location of the hidden pearls. All of these clues are fully shared with the reader:
in fact, they are underlined and called attention to by Wells. In the finale, detective Fleming Stone
builds on these indications to solve the mysteries.

Similarly, in Raspberry Jam, sleuth Fibsy first gets an idea of how the murder was committed,
when he is having a conversation with the killer. The killer tells Fibsy about the killer's career
background. This suddenly gives Fibsy the key idea, of how the murder was done. Fibsy immediately shares
his idea with the reader, too. The whole process is eminently "fair play". It can be mildly criticized,
however, for not giving the reader any time to mull over the clue about the killer's career.

In his essay "The Grandest Game in the World" (1946), John Dickson Carr makes some observations
about Wells' clueing. He claims that there is just a single clue in Wells' The Luminous Face
to the solution. Carr states that this makes the book "technically within the rules" of fair play detection.
But he also says the ideal mystery will have not just one clue, but rather numerous clues,
all linked together by the detective into a fabric of reasoning.

I have mixed feelings about Carr's observations. It is true, that authors who build grand structures
out of multiple clues are creating something exciting and worthwhile. But it is also true that
a book with just one or two clues to each mystery subplot, is still a fair play, classical
detective novel - and not just "technically".

The fact that Anybody But Anne and Raspberry Jam are Impossible Crime tales, adds
some further complexities to this issue. In Impossible Crime mysteries, the main job of the detective -
and the reader - is to come up with a mechanism of how the crime was committed at all. I think
that if the sleuth comes up with a legitimate explanation, it hardly matters if there is a clue for it!
Just finding a way to explain how the crime was done at all, is a satisfactory finale.
If the author throws in one or two clues as well, the solution is even better, of course.

In Anybody But Anne, sleuth Fleming Stone is off-stage for most of the novel.
He shows up in the final chapters, and immediately solves the mystery. This plot construction
is not typical of mystery fiction, although hardly unique to Wells: more often in other writers, the detective
is present throughout nearly the whole book. Wells' approach has strengths and weaknesses.
Clearly, it deprives readers of seeing Fleming Stone in action. People who buy a Nero Wolfe
or Hercules Poirot novel, want to see Wolfe and Poirot, and the more the better!
But Wells' approach also enables a straightforward, satisfactorily logical kind of sleuthing.
Fleming Stone shows up, finds clues, does some thinking, and solves the case. He doesn't tarry, obfuscate,
or make knowing, cryptic remarks while concealing his ideas from the police and the reader.
No, he solves the crime with admirable logic and dispatch.

Carolyn Wells' Evolution as an Impossible Crime Novelist

Here is a chart, showing common kinds of mystery plot, sleuths and setting in Carolyn Wells'
Impossible Crime novels. The categories:

Sealed refers to large areas that are sealed off, but which people penetrate "impossibly".

Plan are floor plan based crimes, fundamentally different from the above sealed-area mysteries.

Subplot are subsidiary mystery puzzles, often clever.

Sleuth is the detective or his assistant, who is most prominent in the story.

Skill shows the chapters where the sleuth is best characterized.

Fake has an X, if the book has a phony "supernatural" or "psychic" storyline, that gets exposed at the end.

Setting refers to locations, often of mild historical interest. And Anybody But Anne is
an early example of the Country House mystery.

R has an X, if the book is especially recommended reading. At least in its best chapters.

Chapters lists the best chapters, of these often uneven novels.

Novel

Year

Sealed

Plan

Subplot

Sleuth

Skill

Fake

Setting

R

Chapters

A Chain of Evidence

1907

Apartment

-

Alibi

Fleming Stone

-

-

NYC Apartment

-

-

The White Alley

1910

House

-

Alibi

Fleming Stone

-

-

Washington Heights

-

1,7,13,14,22

Anybody But Anne

1913

-

X

Pearls, Weapon

Fleming Stone

2, 3

-

Country House

X

1-6,14,17,18,20

Faulkner's Folly

1917

-

X

-

Alan Ford

-

X

-

-

-

The Room with the Tassels

1918

House

-

Announced Crime

Wise, Zizi

15, 16

X

-

-

1,6,15,16,18

The Man who Fell Through the Earth

1919

Office

-

Vanishing in Street

Case Rivers

8, 11, 18

-

NYC Business

X

1,3,4,8,11,18

Raspberry Jam

1919

Apartment

-

Psychic Demos

Fibsy

13 - 18

X

Newark

X

whole book

The Vanishing of Betty Varian

1922

House

-

-

Wise, Zizi

10

-

Maine coast

-

1-3,7, 10

A Chain of Evidence is a poor book, but it is included for completeness' sake.
Some very poor books that simply reuse previous authors' ideas, The Diamond Pin and
The Mystery Girl, are not included in the chart.

One can give a picture of the evolution of Wells' impossible crime novels:

A Chain of Evidence (1907, 1912) seems to be Wells' first impossible crime. It depends
on a simple gimmick, and is a poor novel. Its mystery involves an outsider penetrating a locked apartment.
It also has a simple alibi puzzle. There is perhaps some historical interest, in reading about what a
New York City apartment was like at this early date.

The White Alley (1910, 1915) comes next: apparently its copyright date of 1910, refers
to a magazine serial version of the novel. Here too, the impossibility centers on an outsider
penetrating a locked house (Chapters 1, 7, 13, 14, 22). The plot is much larger in scale,
and involves a whole country house and grounds.
It is architectural in its mystery, in a way that A Chain of Evidence is not.
It is grim, depressing and not fair play. It does have a better alibi puzzle than A Chain of Evidence -
one which anticipates the alibi in Freeman Wills Crofts'The Cask (1920).
The architectural / locked-house ideas anticipate T. H. White's Darkness at Pemberley (1932), and also
in a different way those in Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Y (1932).
The setting, a huge suburban mansion with extensive wooded grounds in the Washington Heights district
of far-Northern Manhattan, anticipates S.S. Van Dine's somewhat similar mansion in
The Dragon Murder Case (1933), a bit further north in the Inwood Hill district.

Next comes Wells' breakthrough with Anybody But Anne (1913-1914). It too involves a
whole house. But now we have a floor plan, and an architectural explanation that is at once
simpler but more logical. The story is far more joyous. It has fair play. It has subsidiary
mysteries of interest: the pearls, the weapon. And her detective Fleming Stone is better characterized, showing a
Sherlock Holmes-like flair for deduction in the early sections. Best parts:
Chapters 1-6, 14, 17, 18, 20.

Faulkner's Folly (1917) is a novel directly in the tradition of Anybody But Anne.
We once again have a floor plan. And an architectural mystery plot that seems like a variation
on the one in Anybody But Anne, if a bit more complex. Wells also introduces a "fake
supernatural" mystery subplot. Such "apparent supernatural events explained as impossible crimes"
will play a major role in the genre in the future.

The Room with the Tassels (1918) is not as interesting. It moves the "fake supernatural"
events front and center. Unfortunately, they are now gloomy and more horror oriented. The
impossibility reverts to Wells' earlier paradigm, of "an outsider penetrating a locked house".
This is a less interesting problem to start with, and Wells' solution is simple and uninspired.
There is no floor plan. Her non-locked room main murder mystery is eerie, however, and she comes up with a logical choice of
killer based on it (Chapters 1, 6, 18). This is a mysterious murder at an announced deadline, in the
tradition of Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905).
The novel's biggest virtue is the introduction of a new detective,
Pennington Wise, and more interestingly, his female assistant Zizi, a well-developed character.
Pennington Wise resembles Fleming Stone, in being a crisp, business-like detective. He is an
artist, like the well-to-do artist suspect in A Chain of Evidence, in a day when artists
were often respected members of the Establishment. Zizi is a lively original, and a woman with a
varied and colorful background. She would make a good movie heroine, and is proof that feminist ideas
about dynamic heroines were already present in the 1910's.

The Man who Fell Through the Earth (1919) opens with a simple architectural mystery.
It is a bit in the tradition of Wells' earlier works, although simpler than most. Wells solves
the puzzle almost immediately, and does not make it the center of her novel (Chapters 1, 3).
While these ideas are a cheat by modern impossible crime standards, as are several of Wells' stories,
the architecture here has its points of imagination. Wells soon introduces a second mystery, about the
near-impossible disappearance in the street of Amory Manning (Chapter 4). (Years later,
Richard Ellington will write an interesting book about a street disappearance in New York City,
Exit for a Dame (1951).) Wells' solution, announced by a strange sleuth-character
Case Rivers (Chapter 8, 11, 18), has a paradoxical Borges-like feel. Wells
had a flair for names, especially in her detectives. The best chapters of The Man who Fell Through the Earth
are very much worth reading, for their mystery ideas. It is one of Carolyn Wells' more experimental novels.

The Diamond Pin (1919) is not architectural at all: there are no secret passages, unlike
many other Wells' works. Instead, it has a rearrangement in space and time solution.
The solution directly recalls Gaston Leroux's French novel Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907) (The Mystery of the Yellow Room).
Wells' plot is full of implausibilities and has a major hole. Still, it shows that she knew about this
kind of impossible crime solution. The locked-room puzzle takes up only a small portion of the book
(Chapters 1, 2, 18). This book is not interesting or enjoyable.

Raspberry Jam (1919-1920) is one of Wells' best impossible crime stories. It avoids
the cheating with secret passages often found in Wells. Instead, it includes impossible crime ideas
that are still considered solid approaches. Its main puzzle is linked to Wells' earliest
such stories: explaining how outsiders might penetrate a locked domicile - here done right. It combines the
locked-apartment mystery of A Chain of Evidence, with a solution that shares imagery with
The White Alley, but which is simpler, more plausible, and fair play. Raspberry Jam also
has three good subplots about explaining purported psychic phenomena, also a Wells tradition. The writing
is lively throughout. Much of the detection is by Fleming Stone's teenage assistant, street kid Fibsy,
who is well characterized. This is not Fibsy's debut, but it is perhaps his richest portrait in a Wells novel.
One suspects such youthful sidekicks appealed to young readers. Thomas W. Hanshew had had his sleuth employ the
teenage assistant Dollops in The Man of the Forty Faces (collected 1910). Both teenagers are working class, too, presumably
like many of the readers of the stories. Fibsy is also Irish, in contrast with the socially proper WASP
hero Fleming Stone, and one suspects that many immigrant readers liked such characters. Fibsy got the frontispiece
of The Diamond Pin, suggesting his popularity with readers.

The Vanishing of Betty Varian (1922) is another story about getting in and out of a locked domicile:
here a whole house. It has some good storytelling, especially in its opening (Chapters 1-3).
Its architectural / landscape setting on the coast of Maine, also set forth in the opening, is vivid, and most suited
to an impossible crime puzzle. One wonders if Ellery Queen
remembered this, when he created The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935).
A later section (Chapter 7) also gives a good summary of the mystery problem as a whole.
Its solution is a real disappointment: both cornball, and a cheat by modern standards (end of Chapter 17).
It is like a simpler version of the same kind of solution in The White Alley.
The tale has poor mystery subplots (the will, the letter signed "Step"). The novel's core mystery is much like
the famous vanishing of Mr. James Phillimore, briefly referred to by Doyle in "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (1922) -
and with no solution given by Doyle. Wells treats her puzzle as an Impossible Crime - a concept not actually in Doyle's brief summary.
One wonders if Wells' novel had an influence on later versions of the Phillimore mystery by John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen,
which also conceive of the vanishing as an Impossible Crime.

The Mystery Girl (1922) has a locked room puzzle that seems like a re-play of the situation in
Anybody But Anne. The solution is an idea that was considered in the middle of Anybody But Anne,
but discarded. Even in Anybody But Anne, this idea was treated by Wells as a common, public domain concept
that the characters had "read in a book" - i.e. not invented by Wells. All of this makes The Mystery Girl
worthless as a puzzle. The motive is also implausible, in this misfire of a book. The opening two chapters
have some pleasant New England college town atmosphere, though.

Non-Impossible Crimes

Wells wrote novels that did not feature impossible crimes. In the Onyx Lobby (1920) has an apartment
house setting, like A Chain of Evidence. It is a dying message mystery (a kind of mystery puzzle already
well-established by other writers by 1920). Imagery in the solution suggests it might have influenced
Ellery Queen'sThe Scarlet Letters (1953), in some small ways -
the actual dying message clues are quite different, but the way they are written by the murdered man
has some similarities.

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton wrote five story collections about Father Brown.
The best are the first, The Innocence of Father Brown,
which contains Chesterton's most ingenious paradoxes serving as
detective concepts, and the third, The Incredulity of Father
Brown, which offers his best put together impossible crimes.
Chesterton's impossible crimes in Incredulity all involve
action - they focus on some ingenious way of committing murder,
often involving moving both the killer and/or the victim's body
from place to place. Chesterton's vision is architectural, as
well, involving the layout of buildings and rooms. As in John
Dickson Carr, Chesterton's solutions are even more imaginative
than the impossible problems themselves.

These books are among the high points of the puzzle plot mystery
story. Chesterton's fiction seems to be the main model for the
great works of the Big Three puzzle plot detective novelists,
Christie, Queen and Carr.

Kinds of Chesterton Stories

Bringing Melodrama to Life. “The Sins of Prince Saradine” and “The Sign of the Broken Sword”
deal with strange schemes by bad guys to kill people.
Both are remote from impossible crimes; instead they rely of clever, off-trail schemes of their villains.
Such tales in The Wisdom of Father Brown as “The Paradise of Thieves” and “The Head of Caesar” also look at criminal schemes,
although these involve financial gain rather than murder.
None of these stories have anything to do with the Rogue tradition of gentleman crooks.
Instead, they focus on ingenious new plot ideas of Chesterton’s.
These stories link with “The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown”, The Man Who Was Thursday,
“The Duel of Dr. Hirsch”, “The Mistake of the Machine”, "The Ghost of Gideon Wise",
“The Blast of the Book”, "The Insoluble Problem", "The Vampire of the Village".
All have to do with Imagined Melodramas: bizarre, lurid events out of trashy fiction,
that are somehow brought to life, to conceal or enable various ends.

Unique Personalities. “The Blue Cross” and "The Purple Jewel" offer appealing, unusual personalities,
set against paradoxical stories involving both daily life and melodrama.

Multiple Interpretations. “The Honor of Israel Gow” challenges the reader and the detective to explain surreal situations,
that seem incomprehensible at first glance. It is delightfully outré.
“The Absence of Mr. Glass” is similar, in its dual explanations of multiple strange phenomena,
although it never has the apparent unexplainability of the earlier tales.
“The Absence of Mr. Glass” does have something the first story lacks: a locked room problem.

"The White Pillars Murder" is another story that develops a dual explanation of all phenomena within it.

Impossible Crimes. “The Secret Garden”, “The Invisible Man”, “The Hammer of God”,
"The Salad of Colonel Cray", “The Fairy Tale of Father Brown”,
"The Vanishing Prince", "The Soul of the Schoolboy", "The Hole in the Wall",
"The Arrow of Heaven", "The Oracle of the Dog", "The Miracle of Moon Crescent", "The Dagger with Wings"
are impossible crime tales,
Many of Chesterton's impossible crimes revolve around architecture. They depend on the
geometric, spatial arrangement of their setting.

“The Wrong Shape” (1910) is the weakest of Chesterton’s impossible crimes,
simply being a reuse of a standard gambit. The tale also suffers from stereotyping.

Stories that derive from Impossible Crimes. While “The Eye of Apollo” is not strictly impossible,
it derives in technique from the impossible crime tale
(it looks impossible for the two main suspects to have committed the crime – they both have alibis).
"The Garden of Smoke" is another story in the same mode, with an unusual, ingenious murder method
that borders on the impossible crime. Both tales also have a female victim, involved with avant-garde
movements, and who is concealing a sinister secret.

"The Crime of the Communist" (1934) resembles a bit "The Garden of Smoke", in dealing with
an unusual murder method. It has no impossible crime features, however.

Techniques

Chesterton's superb literary style has some obvious ancestors.
His prose style, with its rich descriptions of atmosphere and
light, comes from Robert Louis Stevenson.
So does his sense of adventure lurking in every corner of London.
Chesterton's love of paradox, and his ability to sustain a philosophical
argument with wit and invention, is modeled after the plays of
George Bernard Shaw.

Chesterton's "The Vampire of the Village" shows one
of his techniques in pure form. First we see the character as
the conventions of society have it, such as the Rebellious Son,
or the Society Widow. Then we have Chesterton and Father Brown
commenting on what the character is really like, morally and socially.
This allows for a great deal of paradoxical reversal of conventional
ideas, and much social commentary and even satire. It also allows
for a hidden plot to be built up, with the characters and their
relationships being Not What They Seem. This sort of technique
was heavily used at an early date by Fergus Hume.
It shows up in many impossible crime writers, and the intuitionist
tradition in general: Hume, Orczy, Chesterton, Christie, Leslie
Ford. To solve such stories, you have to look at the relationships
in The Right Way. The world has to be looked at upside down. You
have to change your point of view 180 degrees, and 100 percent.
When you get ahold of the idea and the hidden relationships, then
you can understand the mystery.

Chesterton wrote many books about other detectives than Father
Brown. Most of these works contain some gems, as well as a lot
of more ordinary material. I have read all of these, and was going
to offer some detailed suggestions for further reading, but there
is now no need. Marie Smith has edited two anthologies that contain
nearly all the best tales from these collections, Thirteen
Detectives and Seven Suspects. (I haven't felt in such
detailed agreement with a critic's judgment on an author's work
since I read Francis M. Nevins' Ellery Queen
study, Royal Bloodline.) She has also included some really
good rare works, that I had never read.

Chesterton's Father Brown stories largely stick closely to the
paradigms of the detective story, while his non-Father Brown stories
often go beyond them. Many of these latter tales have to be described
as extravaganzas, not conventional fiction at all, with unusual
themes, strange situations and events. Some are not conventional
murder mysteries, but instead focus on some other kind of puzzle:
one story's mystery centers on locating an elusive address.

The Novels

Chesterton's novels are nowhere as good as his short fiction.
Ideas are stretched out to their breaking point, and a great deal
of uninspired philosophical and religious matter is introduced.
The Man Who Was Thursday is particularly overrated, although
it contains an interesting central gimmick.

Manalive (1910), which has never had much of a reputation, is a
mildly interesting novel, barely on the borderlines of mystery fiction -
today's authors are not the only ones publishing works that weirdly stretch
the boundaries of the genre. By contrast, Chesterton is certainly
a major author in the realm of the short story.

Influence of Chesterton on later writers

One can see the influence of “The Invisible Man” on John Dickson Carr.
The numerous impossibilities. The nice, adventurous young man who is the viewpoint character,
but who is clueless at detection. His romantic rivalry with another man for the heroine returns throughout Carr.
So does the sense of sudden “devilment”: here the stamp paper appearing on the window.
There are specific echoes as well. The snowy street, the footprints, and the voice
calling seemingly out of nowhere return in The Three Coffins, and its second murder.

Other Carr-like features of Chesterton:
“The Sign of the Broken Sword” and “The Fairy Tale of Father Brown” are historical detective stories.
The key plot idea of the solution of “The Eye of Apollo” is the same sort of mystery concept
as underlies the key idea in the solution of Carr’s The Crooked Hinge.

Father Brown argues that suspects could not have committed the murders
in “The Mistake of the Machine” and “The Strange Crime of John Boulnois”,
because it is against their psychology. This is a frequent technique in Carr.

The surrealist tale “The Honor of Israel Gow” anticipates Ellery Queen.
As in EQ to come, we have a mysterious set of objects that need to be interpreted.
Father Brown provides many false solutions, before the true one, in the manner of Queen.
When other people despair of making sense, Father Brown comes up with a series of creative ideas,
that show the power of human intellect: also anticipating displays of brilliance by Ellery.
The dark, countryside setting, with a storm raging outside, returns in EQ tales
like “The Two-Headed Dog” (1934). The atmosphere also anticipates "The Invisible Lover" (1934).
Another similarity with “The Two-Headed Dog”: the story’s events do not seem to allow ANY logical explanation, at least at first.

“The Strange Crime of John Boulnois” anticipates Agatha Christie stories,
in which romantic conflicts and psychological characteristics of lovers and rivals,
are woven into the plot. The story also anticipates Christie with its characters from the intelligentsia,
and its English Country Estate setting. “The Strange Crime of John Boulnois”
is rich and absorbing in its characters, and their backgrounds in the intellectual world.
But it is pretty minimalistic as a mystery plot.

The influence of Chesterton's impossible crime tales on Carr
is well understood, but their similar impact on Agatha Christie
is less often cited. Some of Agatha Christie's works are straight
out impossible crime stories. For example, take "The Million
Dollar Bond Robbery" from Poirot Investigates. In
this work, some stolen bonds are smuggled of a ship in a manner
that seems impossible. Unlike Chesterton and Carr, Christie does
not try to bring in any supernatural atmosphere. The general tone
of the inquiry is, "Gee, this is really puzzling!" -
there is never an eerie suggestion of supernatural menace. But
it is a very Chestertonian tale, all the same. Many of Agatha
Christie's other tales are what one might call disguised impossible
crime tales. In these stories, one of the characters has an
alibi, because it looks like it is impossible for him or her to
have committed the crime. Eventually it is revealed that this
person is the real killer, who used an ingenious method to pull
off what seemed impossible. Chesterton would probably have used
this impossible crime method to construct a tale in which it would
have looked impossible for anyone to have committed the
crime. Christie took a different approach, but her underlying
basic technique is identical. Some of Christie's tales are even
closer to the impossible crime proper. Take "The Regatta
Mystery". In that tale, a diamond mysteriously disappears
from a room, and only one man had any apparent way of smuggling
it from the chamber. He is the natural suspect, but Parker Pyne
wonders... Christie could have not included this one suspect's
"obvious" smuggling method, and then she would have
had an impossible crime tale. This is the approach that would
have been taken by Chesterton or Carr. Instead she has a tale
where it looks as if only one person could be guilty. This is
a very common pattern in her work, and it is very closely aligned
with the impossible crime tale.

Chesterton and Bigotry

Chesterton's lesser fiction shows major problems with bigotry against
minority groups. His worst stories are full of hatred for Jews and black people.
There are also tales attacking people in Asia, and gays.

A list of bigoted mystery short stories by G.K. Chesterton would include:

Anti-Black

The Man in the Passage

The Perishing of the Pendragons

The God of the Gongs

Anti-Jewish

The Queer Feet

The Flying Stars

The Duel of Dr. Hirsch

The Purple Wig

The Curse of the Golden Cross

The Actor and the Alibi

The Quick One

The Bottomless Well

The Asylum of Adventure

The Tower of Treason

The Five of Swords

The Moderate Murderer

Anti-Asian

The Wrong Shape

The Three Tools of Death

The Arrow of Heaven

Anti-Native American

The Resurrection of Father Brown

Anti-Gay

The Chief Mourner of Marne

The Worst Crime in the World

Chesterton's best forty or so short stories mark him as a major mystery writer.
These are the tales listed in the Recommended Reading list that opens this article.
But when one explores beyond these stories, the quality of his work falls off rapidly.
The lesser stories are much weaker in terms of plot. And quite a few of them
are deep into bigotry and hatred. Beware!

Most of the above stories are not much good by any standards, considered as works
of literature. The best is "The Duel of Dr. Hirsch", a tale with some imaginative ideas,
unfortunately marred by Chesterton's nasty comments on the Dreyfus Affair.
"The Worst Crime in the World" also has a decent mystery plot, similarly harmed by Chesterton's
anti-gay commentary on Edward II.

Nicholas Olde

The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern (collected 1928)
is the sole known work of fiction by the little known Nicholas
Olde. Olde's book is a collection of mystery tales, starring Rowland
Hern, a genius consulting detective in the style of Sherlock Holmes,
Dr. Thorndyke and Hercule Poirot, complete with an admiring Watson-narrator.
Most are very brief, around ten pages, and comic in tone. One
does not want to oversell Olde. He is indubitably a minor writer.
The small size of the tales mainly precludes them from being full
scale whodunits, with an opening murder and a cast of suspects.
Instead, Olde often unravels some mysterious situation. Or presents
a surprise ending of a criminal scheme hiding under what looks
like respectable daily life. But his tales are also well crafted,
done with a deft command of plotting and wit, and are fun to read.
Their obscurity could result from the fact that only a few of
them deal with murder. Most look at criminal schemes, such as
theft, and in a light-hearted way. Just as anthologists have ignored
H.C. Bailey's comic mystery tales, despite
their excellent formal craftsmanship, to concentrate on his grimmer
works, so might Olde's little bon-bons not have satisfied murderous
norms of later publishers and anthologists. Olde's disregard of
realism in his tales, with the stories turning on far-fetched
conceits, might displease some realism-oriented modern readers,
although their imaginativeness might also delight fans of the
surrealism that is so prominent in much pre-1965 mystery fiction.

"The Invisible Weapon" contains the book's sole impossible
crime plot. The gimmick in this tale was known long before Olde.
The characters in Carolyn Wells' Anybody But Anne (1914)
mention having read it in "a book".

Some of the stories show the strong influence of Chesterton, as
J.F. Norris points out in his introduction to the recent reprint
of the book, from the publisher Ramble House.
"The Windmill" and "The Two Telescopes" are
especially Chesterton-like, in their philosophical dialogue and
symbols that show an ongoing evolution throughout the tale. Both
stories also underscore Olde's bitter skepticism about the upper
classes and their criminal behavior, a form of social criticism
also found in Chesterton. Both of these tales also include full
fledged mystery plots, and are closer to Golden Age mystery paradigms
in general, and Chesterton's Father Brown stories in particular,
than many other stories in the collection.

"The Man with Three Legs" and "The Sin of the Saint"
are also Chesterton-like, but resemble less one of Chesterton's
murder mysteries, than Chesterton's borderline-mysteries in The
Club of Queer Trades and some of Tales of the Long Bow,
which deal with men who take up strange activities. "The
Man with Three Legs" shows the twists and turns that Olde
often added to his plots. It is the richer of these two works.

But other stories have aspects of the British Realist school
of the era, and more specifically R. Austin Freeman.
"The Monstrous Laugh" takes place in a seaside town,
like so many of Freeman works, and is heavily oriented towards
both landscapes and technology, also in the Freeman tradition.
"The Collector of Curiosities", with his own private
museum, could have stepped right out of R. Austin Freeman, as
could the specialty store selling animals in "Potter".
Strange wills, trains, doctors' consulting offices, ordinance
maps and messages with secret codes are also Freemaniana that
run through these tales. Also Freeman-like, unfortunately, is
the way in which the stories are not always fair play - Olde sometimes
withholds much plot information from the reader.

J.F. Norris speculates in his introduction that "Nicholas Olde" was the
pseudonym of some other writer. He turns out to be correct:
Allen J. Hubin has revealed that Olde's real name was
Amian Lister Champneys (1879-1951).

If I had to guess, one might conjecture
that Olde might have been a writer of humorous sketches, maybe
for a magazine like Punch - or at least influenced by the literary tradition
contained in such sketches. The concise writing style, the
ability to pack characters and plot into a small space, the enthusiastic
comic tone, the repartee filled with ironies seen by the reader
but invisible to characters in the story, all are skills the author
might have honed in writing or imitating comic sketches for British magazines.

Max Afford

Max Afford was an Australian mystery writer, and also a well-known radio dramatist.
His mysteries are available from their publisher Ramble House.

The Dead Are Blind

Locked Room. The Dead Are Blind (1937) is a locked room novel.
It has a strange construction for a locked room mystery. Some locked room books,
such as John Dickson Carr'sThe Judas Window (1938),
have an innocent suspect locked in the room with the murder victim, looking like
the only possible guilty party. The Dead Are Blind
has a whole series of suspects locked into the room. At first, this makes the crime
not look impossible at all. But eventually, it develops ideas that firmly link it to
the locked room tradition.

The Dead Are Blind is best in the opening, which shows the events leading up
and including the murder (Chapters 1-3), and a later explanation of how the crime
was committed (Chapter 6). The explanation occurs half way through the book, and
shows how the crime was committed, but not who done it.

The actual murder method is the same one previously used by Stuart Palmer
in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931). However, Afford extends this method into an
ingenious locked room killing, while Palmer simply has it as a murder method without
impossible crime features.

The novel includes a pleasant floor map, but it doesn't turn out to have much to
do with the mystery puzzle.

Radio Background. The opening has a pleasant Background, showing a BBC radio broadcasting studio in London.
Radio was then at its height of its popularity and prestige. Oddly, this radio background largely
disappears from the novel, after this opening section. The Dead Are Blind looks at
both the technological and artistic sides of radio. Its backstage glimpse of a radio play
in production reminds one of Ngaio Marsh's theatrical mysteries.
The Dead Are Blind explicitly compares a radio broadcast to a stage play.
While the depiction of radio in The Dead Are Blind seems sound, it is also brief and
fairly generic. One is not going to learn much new about radio from this novel.
The discussion of acoustics in the various rooms is good; so is the related depiction
of different studios for specialized purposes.

The opening pages enthusiastically mention a series of trade fairs going on in summertime
Britain. They sound interesting, and one wonders why such events are so rarely described in
Golden Age British mystery fiction. All of them sound much more worthwhile than the
upper class twits sitting idly around country houses that often appear in books.

Detectives. The Dead Are Blind features Afford's series detectives: amateur genius Jeffrey Blackburn
and his policeman friend Chief Detective-Inspector William Jamieson Reid of Scotland Yard.
Blackburn is the main detective.
The pair resemble other Golden Age amateur detectives with sympathetic police contacts:
Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey,
S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance and Van Dine's followers.
Blackburn has an affected, intellectual way of talking, full of literary quotations and
sarcastic satirical remarks. He seems like Philo Vance lite. Sayers is actually quoted in
The Dead Are Blind, at the start of the second half of the novel. Blackburn's
literary quotations are well-informed and often wittily related to the events of the tale.

Blackburn is a younger man and Reid is older. The two are roommates: which
is definitely atypical of such pairs in the Golden Age, although Ellery Queen
lived with his father, and police contact, Inspector Queen. Today a pair
like Blackburn and Reid living together would suggest a gay relationship.
Nothing specific in this direction is included in The Dead Are Blind, though.
An unsympathetic character mades an anti-gay comment about effeminate gays
he once met at a party (Chapter 4, Section 2). This comment is neither endorsed nor condemned by the author.

I enjoyed Jeffrey Blackburn as a sardonic commentator in the opening chapters. But feel
generally unimpressed by work he does as a detective after the killing. This is not
one of the better portraits in mystery fiction of a "sleuth in action".

Schools of Detective Fiction. Impossible crimes were regularly featured in the works of
S.S. Van Dine and his followers in the Van Dine school;
they are much rarer in the works of the British Realist school of mystery writers.
Although The Dead Are Blind is set in London, in this regard it seems to have more
in common with the American Van Dine school, than with British Realists. The show biz background of
The Dead Are Blind and its Philo Vance-like sleuth also seem Van Dine-ish.

The article on Ngaio Marsh sets forth features in her writing that
link her to the Van Dine school. Just as Marsh was a New Zealander who set most of her books in
England, so is Max Afford an Australian who wrote British-laid detective novels. While explanations
based in nationality are risky, one does wonder whether Antipodean writers like Marsh and Afford
were open to Van Dine school approaches.

Norman Berrow

Norman Berrow was a New Zealand mystery novellist.
His mysteries are available from their publisher Ramble House.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1949) is an impossible crime novel. It is a series of three linked
mystery puzzles. The middle section of the three, is far and away the best. This section is not perfect,
and so complex that it lacks plausibility, but it shows imagination.

The first section is awful. Its mystery plot has an obvious explanation. The writing is also dour and depressing.

The last of the three mysteries is somewhere in the middle. It has some obvious features.
And its impossible crime aspects also are less than wonderfully inventive. But it does
have some imagination.